Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Criminal probe begun

The Justice Depatment is beginning a criminal inquiry into the destruction of the CIA tapes.

And the New York Times has an Op-Ed by the Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission charging that the CIA obstructed their investigation. And their very clear concise timeline (at the link) leaves little doubt of it.


MORE than five years ago, Congress and President Bush created the 9/11 commission. The goal was to provide the American people with the fullest possible account of the “facts and circumstances relating to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001” — and to offer recommendations to prevent future attacks. Soon after its creation, the president’s chief of staff directed all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the commission.

The commission’s mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation....

What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.


Obstructing an investigation into a terrorist attack? An investigation whose purpose is to prevent future attacks?

Do they still have hanging offenses? Because if anything still constitutes a hanging offense, that's got to be ONE, doesn't it?

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